One of the most posted memes on Twitter is a photograph of a bread roll and the question: “What do you call this?” Is it a roll? A bun? A barm cake? A bap? A cob? A muffin? Such a question is a deliberate attack on the British psyche and on our regional food culture. It is a desperate plea for retweets. And it is tiresome given it pops up with striking regularity.
But now a new roll-related phenomenon is now threatening to take over in popularity: the cheese and onion cob.
Pictures online show the white bread filled with an incredibly thick slice of Cheddar (a wedge, really, a doorstop), two or three hoops of raw white onion (also indelicate in size) and nothing else. One cannot tell if the bread has been buttered and so the sandwich appears, frankly, dry. Appetising? We’ll get to that.
Such filled cobs (we are in the Midlands after all) have been a mainstay in scores of pubs in these parts for decades, just as sandwiches of some description have long been available in boozers across Britain, but this specific item – the impressive chunk of cheese and frisbees of onion – seem localised to parts of the Black Country, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby and surrounds.
They are everywhere from the Jeweller’s Arms in Birmingham to the Blue Boar in Leicester. Pictures have invited no shortage of curiosity, intrigue, horror and adoration. But one pub, the Dew Drop Inn in Ilkeston, has attracted the most attention, and so I travelled 127 miles from London to Derbyshire to get my hands on one.
The Dew Drop Inn is a grand corner pub right next to Ilkeston train station. It is a former Victorian hotel, imposing in red brick and accessed through the beer garden along the street.
Inside, it is cavernous, with local eggs for sale on an old piano and various instruments dotted about the place. There’s a glass counter similar in design to an old village Post Office, before three separate drinking rooms behind closed doors.
The public bar at the front was where I found locals sitting around a log fire. One was eating a cob and all were drinking beer. A bartender knew immediately that I was from out of town and “coming in to try one of our world famous cobs?” I ordered one with a pint of Cruzcampo – the selection of cask ales, stouts and lagers was one of the best I’ve seen anywhere – and bedded in.
The landlord, Tony, was having a day off, but pub manager of four years Savannah Webb soon appeared and we went to the saloon bar, much quieter in the afternoon, to talk cobs. “Who knows when they were invented,” she tells me. “But I think we were the first to do them with such a big block of cheddar and slices of onion – they’re mad, we know.
“It was the last owner who started it all off but Tony started promoting them on social media, putting up posters and trying to get more interest. We didn’t think they would get so famous. The buzz online has been crazy.”
On a busy day at the Dew Drop Inn, Webb says they might sell as many as 200 cobs, each one £3.50. They are one of a handful of classic pub snacks available: sausage rolls, pork pies and scotch eggs come from a local butcher. And if you don’t fancy cheese and onion, ham and tuna mayo are also on the menu.
Webb says: “I think they’ve been a thing here for 10 years. They’re part of the place now. People moan if there aren’t any left. The other night we had music on and Tony couldn’t get out of the kitchen. Orders just kept coming.
“I don’t think we could ever take the sandwich off the menu. They’re just so popular. People come for miles to try them, too. We had a couple in from Chesterfield the other day.”
It is an absurd creation, a wedge of Cheddar enough to cater for a family if grated onto a chilli con carne or carved for a ploughman’s, the raw onions of spectacular, glistening heft.
But together, tempered by the soft gentleness of the white bread, I can see why the sandwich has proved to be regaling: the pluck of the cheese, heavy on the mouth, and the sharp tang of onion combine to become true beer food, to be devoured after more than one pint.
It is fragrant, punchy, conjuring those feelings you get in a fish and chip shop by the sea or at a greasy spoon in the alleyways of Soho.
One regular comes into the bar while Webb heads into the kitchen to find me a scotch egg. Abbie Scott moved to the area from Cumbria for work and has come to love cobs.
“I’m part of the furniture here,” says Scott. “I used to eat the cobs and I still do every now and then but they are a lot so they’re more of a treat now.
“The point is, they’re a sort of community asset. They’re our thing. I know one lad called Jack who comes in and has two. There are a few regulars who have one at least once a week.
“Adie and Richard (regulars) come in and always finish the whole sandwich with a pint. And there’s another fella who comes in at a certain time, and they know to have one ready. He sulks if they don’t. I love it here for the sandwiches.”
Scott also tells me about the mystery dog who nabbed a cob from the case of a trumpet, left there for a hardworking musician. Or the “Dew Drop on tour gang” who sport proud t-shirts when on holiday, eager to show off not just the sandwich, but the pub.
I leave the Dew Drop Inn replete, a little tired and if not lactose intolerant, worrying whether I might suffer the effects regardless. But I would return, again and again, to visit such a wonderful pub; to sit around a log fire with the people of Ilkeston and have a beer among the heady waft of cheese and onion.
